We haunt every medium we make.

June 13, 2006

Lost, the Lostpedia, and Web 2.0 collaboration

Inspired by talking with tv expert Jason Mittell yesterday, followed by finishing the last episodes of Lost, season two (fuming, muttering "Ozymandias" under my breath), I explored the Lostpedia. What a fine resource for the show...

I wanted to note it here as a general example of collective action mediated by social software. The wiki content is rich, updated frequently, and created by a varied, far-flung authorship swarm. It also connects projects built on the web using other platforms.

As an example, consider the blast door map (a mysterious description of the series' setting, found on the back of a door closed for the first time). The Lostpedia page introduces it, describing when it appears and what we know about it, revealed episodically, and offers one screen capture, copied here in smaller form. That page then links to visualizations published after its first sighting, such as this detailed version, an interactive map with multiple layers to toggle on and off, GIS-style, along with severalothers annotated by viewers. This is another case of "consumers" producing content, not in isolation but through a dynamic, critical, iterative, social process. One doesn't have to be an obsessive fan of the show to see the collaborative power here.